It's pretty old news now but the reCAPTCHA extension won the "Contribution of the year" at this years eZ Awards! A little embarrassing to tell the truth, given that the extension simply exposes the reCAPTCHA system which does all the hard work.

If you use the extension please drop a comment on the blog and link to your site. It's great to win awards but even better to see the extension in action.

Recently I was working on a multilingual site and had to add some static text in a number of languages. I added the supplied text and then viewed the resulting page. Having previously lost many hours of my life to dealing with character encoding issues I momentarily regretted I'd gotten out of bed when confronted with mess that was before me.

Quickly regaining my composure I realised that eZ Publish must be doing the transformation and with a bit of digging I discovered that by default templates are seen by the system as being in iso-8859-1 and are converted into utf-8 for display.In my case eZ Publish was doing what it was told and converting the already utf-8 characters in utf-8.

There are 2 options for telling eZ publish the character encoding of a template. Firstly you can configure eZ publish that all templates are utf-8 by editing template.ini.append.php in overrides for the entire site or your specific siteaccess to limit the effect.